He gestured at the Sun spread out before him. She noticed that his hand was shaking. His frustration suddenly got the better of him. He picked the paper up, screwed it into a ball and threw it across the room against the nearest wall. Everybody in the canteen turned to look. Cooper seemed oblivious.
“It’s the last straw, boss,” he said, unconsciously echoing Mac’s words. “Nothing’s changed. There can’t be anybody who doubts that Marshall killed Clara and his elder daughter, can there? And God knows what he’s done to Janine’s head, or Jennifer, or whatever she calls herself now. What has she gone through, what’s he done to her, for God’s sake? She believes the bloody man’s innocent, she really does, I’m sure of it. How can that be? She and her sister were about the same age as my kids when it happened...”
Cooper paused, shot her an anxious look. After that second time they spent together, when he told Karen that he had always been faithful to his wife, they had never discussed her again, and neither did he ever talk about his children. It was part of a kind of unspoken deal between them.
“It’s all right, Phil,” she said.
He half-nodded. “Well, I think of them, I think of something like that happening to them, of one of them being killed, of the other one being screwed up somehow, screwed up for life. That’s what happened to Jennifer, there’s no doubt about that. And when I watch my kids playing or eating their tea or something, I get this vision... I just can’t bear it...”
Phil looked down abruptly. “I’m sorry, I guess I’m a bit wound up about everything right now.”
That was an understatement, thought Karen. She studied him anxiously. She knew how torn apart he was. She knew he didn’t know what to do, and that his personal dilemma was adding greatly to the stress he was experiencing at work. She also knew that what there was between them was just as important to him as it was to her. She did not doubt that for one moment. They were both in a state of turmoil, but she actually thought his was probably worse than hers.
It was so obvious that his personal feelings were all mixed up with his feelings of failure over Richard Marshall. He really was deeply upset. It hurt her to see him like this. She wanted to reach out and take him in her arms. She almost always wanted to do that. But in this instance more than ever. She could not, however, do so in the police canteen. Not if she wished to survive. She compromised by reaching out under the table with one hand and squeezing his knee.
“I do understand, Phil,” she said.
He managed a wan smile. “I know you do, Karen,” he said quietly. The use of her Christian name, something he usually avoided at work, further indicating just how troubled he was. “But even that doesn’t always help.”
She could see the pain in his eyes, and it made her feel terribly sad.
He looked over his shoulder then and glanced around the room, as if checking out, a little late, she thought, whether anyone was listening to their conversation. Then he spoke in a whisper.
“Can I come round this evening?”
She nodded. She couldn’t say no, and he knew it. That was the way it had been since the night of Marshall’s appeal, and that was the way it would continue. Phil Cooper, the man who didn’t cheat on his wife, had become rather good at it, it seemed to Karen.
Most days he seemed to find an excuse to spend at least some time with her. She had given him a key to her flat. If they weren’t able to be together at night, she became accustomed to being woken by him early in the morning when he had sneaked away from home to come to her. More usually, he would spend at least a couple of hours with her, often more, after work. Occasionally he would stay for the whole night. Karen had no idea what he told his wife, but she accepted totally that he was experiencing genuine anguish. There was absolutely no question of her not believing that. And so was she.
She was, of course, well aware that one day they would have to confront the reality of their situation. Fate would probably play a part, she thought. It often did in these situations. Meanwhile she was happy to be an ostrich. Well, happy was something of an exaggeration. But there were only two alternatives. One was that they should stop seeing each other, and the other was that Cooper would take the initiative and tell his wife. The first was definitely not an option, and she somehow suspected that it never would be. As for the second, well — although their present situation was far from ideal, she accepted that quite probably neither of them was ready for that second option yet. Apart from anything else, in love as she was, Karen was also aware of the implications on her career if this professionally dangerous relationship blew up in their faces. And her career was all there had been in her life for a very long time. She did not take lightly any threat to what she had achieved through sheer hard work and determination. Her recent promotion to detective superintendent had very nearly not happened because a previous case she had led had threatened to go catastrophically wrong. Now already she was facing another tricky time in the job, and she knew darned well that she was lucky not to have found herself in much bigger trouble.
Politics, as executed by Tomlinson, a master politician if nothing else, had been her saviour, she suspected. The chief constable and those who pulled his strings at Westminster, had, she reckoned, decided that to take matters further, and certainly to delve into any kind of witch-hunt concerning blame in the Marshall affair, would serve merely to draw further attention to it and cause more mayhem than already existed.
Karen was, however, almost certainly in a more vulnerable position than she had ever been before.
John Kelly, too, found himself more upset than he had expected to be by Marshall’s release. It bugged him. It really bugged him. He didn’t like to think about the reasons why this case mattered so much to him. Kelly had allowed himself to be brought down both by events around him and by his own behaviour often enough in the past.
Like Karen Meadows, he forced himself to put on a brave front. He made himself concentrate on other aspects of his life — his work with the Argus, his son Nick, Moira, the woman he lived with who was always so patient with him — rather than dwelling on a situation he could do nothing about.
However, just over three weeks after the Sun’s serialization of Richard Marshall’s story, Kelly made one of his increasingly rare trips to London for a farewell party for the newspaper’s veteran crime correspondent, Jimmy Finch.
Kelly enjoyed his occasional forays back into a world he had long ago left, but this time he had an ulterior motive. Finch’s swan song had been to mastermind the Marshall buy-up. Kelly wanted to talk to him about it. He couldn’t resist the opportunity. The case was on Kelly’s mind all the time, however much he tried to deny it. He knew that Finch would have spent a lot of time with Richard Marshall and, knowing the reporter’s habits, he would almost undoubtedly have gone drinking with him.
The party was held at a wine bar not far from the Sun’s Wapping offices and just around the corner from the Tower Hotel where Kelly booked himself in for the night. There was a good turnout, mostly other journalists, but also quite an impressive cross-section of police contacts, not to mention a villain or two. Finch was old school, the reporter’s reporter who also managed to walk the tightrope in his speciality, thus maintaining the trust of his connections on either side of the law while at the same time somehow or other managing to keep his extremely demanding tabloid editor happy. He was a popular man, big, brash and genial, his lifestyle evident in both his girth and his flushed features.
Jimmy Finch, already showing the signs of having had a considerable amount to drink, greeted Kelly, his equal in height but certainly not in bulk, with an enthusiastic bear hug, and led him straight to the bar.